As the library can be one of the most productive places to write essays, conduct research and get university work done, some of you might be worried about how you will work effectively from home. To help you overcome any intimidation about working from home, here are some tips on how to maximise the most of your home work space.

Avoid working in bed or eating while working

As comfortable as it may seem, working from your bed is not going to guarantee the most productive output. Sitting in bed and working is only a few steps away from closing your eyes and sleeping! If possible, you want to make sure that there is a distinction between where you sleep and where you work – if possible, you should work on a desk or table. This will allow you to write notes if needed, sit up straight and work in a manner that mimics the library. Treat your work space like you would the library, and avoid eating while working as well. Structuring your day in the same way as your time in the library can help you avoid procrastinating at home.

Try out some white noise or lo-fi music

If you are used to working on the silent floors of the library, it might be difficult to transition into studying at home – especially if your family are in all the time and are noisy! If you have headphones or a speaker, it might be worth trying out some songs without lyrics to distract you from your background noise. Lo-fi or white noise are fantastic options to play in the background when writing essays or revising, as they don’t have any lyrics and are designed to keep you calm. This video is fantastic as you can see a live animation of someone studying at the same time as you!

Make the most of your home working space

Unlike the library, working from home offers you the opportunity to use more visual methods to revise or plan an essay. If you have some free wall space or enjoy visualising your tasks, post-it notes are a fantastic, budget-friendly way to jot down notes that can be stuck on your wall to help you learn things. Throughout my second year of university, one of my housemates stuck post-it notes with Spanish words and phrases around our house to help her learn everyday objects! It is a fantastic way to subconsciously pick up information, without much effort. If you are looking for an environmentally-friendly way to visualise your tasks or demonstrate your work, you can order a whiteboard online to display your work in an easier way. This is also a brilliant way to practice questions or visualise complex equations.

Tidy up your workspace

One of the things I loved about working in the library was that you were able to have a clean working environment. Even though this is difficult to replicate in student homes, if you are getting used to working at home, I would strongly recommend organising your work space at the beginning and end of every day. This allows you to keep all your work in a manageable way, which is helpful if you have to share your space with others. By packing everything away at the end of the day, you know where everything will be when you wake up! When you next want to be productive, you can then rearrange everything to suit the specific task you are doing.

Even though this transition to working at home can be difficult, you might find that these tips help you increase productivity in your own space. Using tools like visualisation methods can help you memorise simple information passively, which could be helpful for online exams or assessments. As always, the online library tools are available for you to use, so now could also be the time to try new management tools like EndNote to help your workflow!

How do you make the most of working from home? Tweet us at @warwicklibrary, email us at libraryblogs@warwick.ac.uk, or leave a comment below.